Fantastic boxing card headlined by Artur Beterbiev-Dmitry Bivol rematch could be a catalyst for a turnaround for the business in the U.S.

On Saturday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of all places, perhaps the deepest fight card in a half-century or more will take place at Kingdom Arena. 

If you count the interim version, there will be seven title fights on the card. Five from my ranking of the 16 best boxers in the world — No. 4 Artur Beterbiev, No. 6 Dmitry Bivol, No. 11 Shakur Stevenson, No. 14 Israil Madrimov and No. 15 Vergil Ortiz Jr. — are competing.

Boxing, which has been the butt of so many jokes in my lifetime, has stepped up and is acting, at least for this night, like a real sport. The show in Riyadh features important, even historic, matches involving great fighters at a fair price.

What more could a lifelong boxing fan ask? A kid who got into the sport by hearing Muhammad Ali talk trash in black and white and recite poetry off the cuff, who didn’t realize the gift of what he was seeing on Nov. 10, 1965, when he went with his father to the Pittsburgh Civic Arena for what turned out to be Sugar Ray Robinson’s final fight, is in Heaven.

Robinson was 44 then, and lost a decision that night to Joey Archer. He was committed to the history books, where ever since he’s been remembered as the greatest to ever do it by most historians.

Unfortunately, not many others maintained that love of boxing since those halcyon days. 

Boxing was one of the three big sports in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century, along with baseball and horse racing.

For a variety of reasons — corruption, ineptness, deaths in the ring, and the lack of regulation or proper entry barriers — the sport began to lose its grip even as early as 1979. 

Promoters mismanaged events, many fighters became disillusioned, boxers died on national television and the sport’s association with the mob and illegal gambling further tarnished its reputation. It led to a mass exodus as fans drifted toward better managed sports.

Oh, the 1980s would be a spectacular decade with great talents emerging, but boxing was clearly losing traction and influence with its audience despite that.

I wasn’t one who ever thought about drifting away.

I’ve seen boxing go through its ups and downs. As a kid, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to witness Robinson’s final bout. That moment, along with others in the 1970s, cemented my love for the sport.

Yet, over the decades, the sport slowly lost its place in the landscape. But now, 60 years after Robinson’s final fight, 44 years after Ali hung them up, this card in Riyadh is shaping up to be the most important and significant one in decades.

Is a return to glory imminent? Glory might be too big a word, but at least some of boxing’s key power brokers appear to have seen the light. Led by Ring Magazine owner Turki Alalshikh and the sovereign wealth fund in Saudi Arabia, the times seem to be changing for the good.

For a skinny young kid from Pittsburgh who’d long dreamed of writing about and watching sports for a living, things didn’t get too much better than they were in 1979.

The Pirates won the World Series. Future team owner Bob Nutting was only 17, so it’d be a few decades before he’d get around to destroying one of Major League Baseball’s great franchises.

The Steelers won the Super Bowl for the third time in five years. In college football, that aspiring journalist who often wore a gold t-shirt that boasted “I root for two teams: Pitt, and whoever is playing Penn State,” couldn’t have been more elated that Alabama won the national championship. He didn’t adore the Tide so much as he despised the Nittany Lions.

Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans bested Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores for the NCAA men’s basketball championship. Little did we know it, but the NBA was about to explode.

Sugar Ray Leonard became a world boxing champion for the first time, and that wide-eyed kid got to indulge his passion by writing about boxing for a real, live newspaper.

Oh, the fight cards were at a Howard Johnson’s and the boxers were tomato cans and pugs, but they were evenly matched and they came to beat the snot out of each other.

They weren’t the kind of fights that anyone would remember, except that the crowd got such a big kick out of them. I realized at 20 years old that people who were into boxing wanted to see two guys slugging it out.

Too often over the last 45+ years, that’s not what we got.

On Saturday, though, in Riyadh, we are. It’s no stretch to say that all seven of these bouts are strong enough to, in another place and time, headline a card by itself.

Take a look for yourself:

• Undisputed light heavyweight champion Artur Beterbiev (21-0, 20 KOs) versus Dmitry Bivol (23-1, 12 KOs) in a rematch for the undisputed belt.

• IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) versus Joseph Parker (35-3, 23 KOs).

• WBC middleweight champion Carlos Adames (24-1, 18 KOs) versus Hamzah Sheeraz (21-0, 17 KOs).

• WBC lightweight champion Shakur Stevenson (22-0, 10 KOs) versus Floyd Schofield (18-0, 12 KOs).

• Interim WBC super welterweight champion Vergil Ortiz Jr. (22-0, 21 KOs) versus Israel Madrimov (10-1-1, 7 KOs).

• Zhilei Zhang (27-2-1, 22 KOs) versus Agit Kabayel (25-0, 17 KOs) for the interim WBC heavyweight title.

• Interim WBO light heavyweight champion Joshua Buatsi (19-0, 13 KOs) versus Callum Smith (30-2, 22 KOs). 

We already know the Beterbiev-Bivol fight will be fantastic, because they had a great fight in October that Beterbiev won by majority decision.

All the fights are competitive, which is evidenced by the betting odds. In four of the bouts, the favorite is less than 2-1. Dubois is a -300 favorite over Parker, Sheeraz is a -270 favorite to claim the belt from Adames and Stevenson is -1200 over Schofield.

The sport has given its fans much reason to complain over the years, but the card on Saturday isn’t one of them. It can’t, of course, just be about this show. This has to be built upon.

And while it’s unrealistic to think that boxing can climb back to become one of the three or four most popular sports in the world, it’s certainly not unrealistic to think it has room for a significant amount of growth.

I’ve loved boxing all of my life. But I don’t want to remember the late 1970s and the 1980s as the good old days. I want to talk about what a fantastic resurgence the sport made in the early part of the 21st century.

It’s possible.

Unlikely, I’d say, only because too many folks who find their way into positions of power in boxing have their hands out and don’t have the good of the sport overall in mind. 

But it’s possible. And if it makes that resurgence, historians may look back on Saturday’s card as the catalyst it took to shake the sport from its doldrums.

There are significantly more entertainment options for consumers now than there was in 1960, 1970 or even 1980. And boxing fans who have routinely stolen pay-per-view signals have unwittingly hurt the sport because promoters couldn’t get the revenue they expected because of the theft.

Thanks to Alalshikh, Saturday’s card is only $25.99. It’s an extraordinary card at a third the price that Premier Boxing Champions and Amazon Prime Video just asked for the show headlined by David Benavidez over David Morrell.

They’ve heard your complaints as fans and have responded.

It’s now time for the sport’s real fans to acknowledge that and show their support in the most meaningful way possible.